Sunday, February 24, 2013

Deleted Scene - Lunch

“Mom got our lunches wrong again,” Jordan announced
and his thin, tanned legs folded up, dropping him cross-legged on the grass
beside her. He leaned back against the hot bricks of the bell tower and dropped
his gym bag off his shoulder, offered his sack lunch to her and reached for
hers.

Jo had discovered as much in first period when she’d
peeked into her brown paper bag and found an apple and two lidded plastic
dishes, one full of crunchy peanut butter, the other cold hash browns. Barf. She
accepted her own lunch – turkey and lettuce on wheat, chips, a warm Coke – and
settled her shoulder blades against the bricks, eyes moving out across the
campus that lay stretched before them: a maze of cobbled walks, Bradford pears
with shiny dark leaves, and a collection of old brick buildings that all
smelled of damp and BO inside.

Their high school had once been a college, and its
campus was large and sprawling. Jo liked being outside better than most
anything, so the walks between buildings during class change were her favorite
parts of the day. And she liked eating lunch outside – always up against the
bell tower across from the senior building, on a patch of Bermuda grass, tucked
out of sight from most of her classmates. She liked school – the place; her
studies; the smell of clean filler paper and freshly sharpened pencils; the
colorful blocks on the periodic table of elements; the big windows outside her
biology classroom; biology class itself – but the people made it a miserable
place. Being small and tomboyish and unaffected and uncouth had never been such
a burden as it was now that she was in high school. Her Freshman year was fast
becoming a sort of torture test, one in which she let herself go numb and
suffered through without any great emotional attachment to anything. She had
girlfriends – Megan and Claire who sometimes laughed at her instead of with
her – but her brother Jordie was still her closest friend. Jordie…and Tam.

Tam counted double because he wasn’t her brother.

Under a warm glazing of afternoon sunshine, she
unwrapped her sandwich, took a bite, and scanned the knot of students on the
green in search of him. She spotted him because he was the only student not
lingering and laughing, but instead making a bee line for the bell tower,
ignoring all the laughing, chattering peers around him. Jo’s eyes skipped over
him and she opened the tab of her soda, took a fortifying swallow.

Tameron Henry Wales, eighteen-years-old, six feet
even, might have been a senior, and he might have been her brother Mike’s best
friend, but she was the one he found at lunch every day, and her stomach just
wouldn’t stop somersaulting at the thought. Today, he was in his usual tight
jeans and a pair of scuffed black Converse sneaks, a long-sleeved white shirt
beneath his black t-shirt, the white sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His black
hair – longer and spiked in the front, standing up on top – had a brown sheen
in the sunlight.

“My subtle sister over here,” Jordan quipped before
he bit into his apple, and she realized she was staring.

Jo transferred her gaze to the toes of her sneakers
and reached for her Coke again, watching Tam in her periphery as he left the
brick walk and came to sit down across from them on the grass, hands braced
back behind him, long legs stretched out in front.

“Hey, guys.”

“Hi!” Her voice was a happy chirp, and she hated it,
wished she was more sophisticated than that, but when she met Tam’s blue eyes –
and damn, they were blue – he was
smiling at her. One of those white, straight, shark smiles of his that flashed
his sharp canines.

“S’up?” Jordan greeted, prying the lid off his hash
browns. He forked up a big bite of cold, greasy potatoes and popped it in his
mouth, reaching for his plain peanut butter while he chewed.

“That’s sick,” Tam said of his eating patterns, but
Jo watched his eyes track the fork, a familiar, hungry light in them.

She didn’t know, because no one would tell her,
exactly why Tam’s home life was “shitty,” but she’d accepted it as fact and
wouldn’t push her friend about it. He was too proud to be pushed. So instead
she brought him things – her mom’s cookies, an extra bag of chips, a half a
sandwich – and pretended her mom had packed her too large a lunch and that she
wasn’t going to eat whatever it was anyway. Today, she had two oatmeal raisin
cookies as big around as teacup saucers, white frosting drizzled across the
top. She pulled them out and the sun caught the sugar-glaze sheen of the
frosting, flashing bright as a new coin. Tam’s eyes snapped to them.

“I don’t like oatmeal,” Jo lied. “You want these?”

His lips parted, gaze trained with laser precision
on the cookies; Jo could see the faint shadow of his tongue ring. “You’re not
going to eat them?”

“No.” She extended them in offering, holding the bag
by the seal, the cookies dangling.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

He took them gently, but then his manners dissolved;
the bag was open and he’d demolished one in the span of a heartbeat. The second
one he consented to actually chew, and Jo decided she would only eat half of
her sandwich.

“Do you have practice?” he asked Jordan between
bites.

Jordan was eating peanut butter with a spoon like
that was normal, and nodded. “Yeah.”

She was a geek for thinking it, but there was
something centering about being surrounded by her family. Tam and Mike and
Jordan and she had been a foursome for so long now that, even without Mike –
especially without him, more like – she’d long since stopped trying to belong
anywhere else. Content to listen to them talk about Jordan’s track practice,
she nibbled at her food and stared unseeing across campus, letting the sun warm
her face.

Tam said her name three times before she realized
the conversation had been turned back on her. “What?” she asked, glancing to
his face, struck for a moment, as always, by the lovely way he looked in her
eyes.

He grinned at her and her insides turned to melted
butter. “Mike and I are going to Wal-Mart after school. You wanna come?”

For three broke high school students, a trip to
Wal-Mart meant packs of gum and magazines; skulking through the aisles as if
they had money to spend and more important places to go once they left. A
little play acting at adult life. A place to kill time and reflect on the
boredom and dissatisfaction of being too old for childhood and too young for the
rest of their lives. For her, it was thousands of square feet in which she
could play the part of Tam’s shadow without her mother watching.

“Mike won’t like it,” she said.

Tam shrugged, gave her another of those melting
smiles. “Mike can get over it.”

Now

“Miss Willa!”

“I keep telling her only dogs can hear her when she
gets like that,” Jordan said as he dropped down onto the bench beside Jo.

His wife, crouching in front of the stroller, her
floral skirt fanning around her, stuck out her tongue at him. Ellie was
nineteen and more than a little bit stunning – not that she knew it. She was
also crazy about Willa. “Your Uncle Jordie is a grouch,” she told the baby with
a blinding smile. “We won’t listen to him.”

“Nobody ever does,” Jo assured, and her brother
snatched the Subway bag out of her hands in protest. “Yeah. I think what you
meant to say was ‘thanks for lunch, sis.’”

He shot her the bird instead and Ellie laughed as
she scolded him.

They were at one of the benches that lined a stretch
of drive that connected campus to parking deck, the sun beating down on the
blacktop and sending up heat mirages thick as smoke. The college was busy in
the way of mid-semester: the foot traffic lazy, the AC units thumping. The
campus, even more expansive than when Jo had been a student here, was green and
carved with sidewalks, original buildings shaded by new editions. The crepes
were in bloom and walking beneath them, headed toward her, was her six-foot
blue-eyed husband.

She glanced down at her scrub top from work –
spattered with something brown she’d rather not think about – and wished she
was dolled up for him…or, at least, as close to dolled as she ever came. But
they didn’t live pretty lives. She had the rest of the afternoon off; she had
Will, and she had lunch – all that and the tumble of memories watching her
skater boy walk through the sunshine brought to the forefront of her mind.

Sometimes, she thought, life turned out to be an
adventure. But sometimes, it turned out to be a butter yellow afternoon that
belonged to the people who mattered, and that was better than even the grandest
of adventures.

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